If the intention of the proposers
of the Green New Deal (GND) was to initiate a debate, they were wildly
successful in this household. Joan sees
it as welcome evidence that important people are finally getting serious about
the climate crisis, and that consciousness-raising is more important than the
specific proposals. I view it as a
formula for disaster and national bankruptcy, and since I am the one writing
this essay, it will be my perspective you have to endure.
As the debate is already off to a
bad start, let me say that I find in Ms. Ocasio-Cortez many attractive features
of youth, including vivacity, idealism, sincerity, good humor—qualities far
from conspicuous in many of the grim conservatives whose criticisms of
her often combine a personal element of churlishness with condescension. Admittedly her plan’s rollout was so
maladroit that its proponents had to remove all specifics from the Internet,
leaving only a feel-good congressional resolution. It is easy to play “Gotcha!” with such
clauses of the now vanished GND document as a guaranteed income for those unwilling to work. I thought all along that was evidence of hasty
copy-editing. What excites my
incredulity are features the plan’s authors undoubtedly do mean. In an op-ed in yesterday’s Times David Brooks pretty well identifies those points, though even he falls
for the suggestion that the “GND” is plausibly modeled on FDR’s New Deal. The New Deal was never a comprehensive
program based in a fixed theory, let alone in “science”. Roosevelt himself frequently admitted its improvisational
character and spoke without embarrassment of the experimental, trial-by-error
nature of many of its disparate parts.
Most people I talk with do not
recognize the origin of the phrase “New Deal”.
They think it has something to do with the sort of deal-making
supposedly associated with great deal-makers.
In fact, it is a term borrowed from various card games, especially
poker. A “new deal” is a fresh
distribution of resources, allowing a new chance to players unsuccessful with
the hand they were first dealt. It is thus
a fresh beginning or a radical “reset”. Brooks
also seems to accept the greenists' poor analogy between their program and the
national effort demanded by World War II.
As prodigious as the war effort was, it pales in comparison with what
the GND would demand. In fact of all the
pharaonic enterprises recorded by history, only one strikes me as vaguely
analogous: Stalin’s Five Year Plans, which, though somewhat less radical than
the GND, approximated its proposed duration.
The Five Year Plans were designed to transform a vast agrarian nation
whose land-use customs had developed over centuries into a heavy industrial
powerhouse, and to do that in a very short time. A sideline was the pseudo-industrialization
of agriculture. The plans were
successful to the degree that they greatly increased the production of pig iron
and electrical power. They certainly
helped enable Soviet victory in the world war. But the human costs were obscene
even for the criminal state established by the Bolsheviks. In order to prosecute a pharaonic project successfully
it is necessary to gain or compel popular buy-in and get rid of all critics of
Pharaoh, real or potential. There were
hecatombs of the purged and liquidated, and armies of the enslaved. Stalin “reformed” agriculture by murdering or
exiling millions and by turning the breadbasket of the Ukraine into a
wilderness. It is inconceivable to me
that Americans will voluntarily sign up for the GND. And if not voluntarily, under what duress?
This melodramatic
question brings us to the larger issue of Socialism and its strangely
recidivist appearance on the American political scene. Here we shall get nowhere without agreement
on definitions. “Communism,” said Lenin
“is Soviet power plus electrification.” Socialism
is not elective democracy plus widely supported social programs, as in
Scandinavia. It is not even the Welfare
State program of the post-War Labour Party in Britain. No people has ever freely elected Socialism,
which according to Marxist theory can be born only in violence. The fundamental requirement of Socialism as
imagined by its inventors and implemented by its historical practitioners is total
State ownership of the “means of production”.
Its necessary corollary requires unchallengeable coercive State power to
administer that arrangement. Those are
both terrible ideas, and the fact that Donald Trump opposes them redeems them
not one whit.
The history of Socialism—not the
theory, but “actually existing Socialism” as its proponents called it—has been
calamitous. Let me recommend two heavy academic books in
defense of that sweeping condemnation: The
Black Book of Communism (1997) and Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy: a History of Socialism in Russia (1994). Nor
was it any accidental aberration or external intrusion, as opposed to the
essential features of Socialism—state ownership of the means of production and
state coercion demanded for their operation—that doomed the USSR, the East
Block, Cambodia, half of Africa, Cuba, and, yes, Venezuela.
Yes, I know, it can’t happen here. In
truth, I actually don’t think it can; and I am reluctant to engage further in
competing apocalypticisms. The “road to
serfdom” is certainly the last thing on the minds of the well-meaning proposers
of the GND. But I fear a great deal else
must not have been on their minds either—such as the potential damage that
vatic half-bakedism can do to a very serious cause. To be fair, the GND is not half-baked. It’s been nowhere near an oven. As Brooks puts it: “The authors of the
Green New Deal assume that technocratic planners can master the movements of
328 million Americans and design a transportation system so that ‘air travel
stops becoming necessary.’ (This is from
people who couldn’t even organize the successful release of their own
background document.)”
